


you're a flashback in a film reel

by roseandsangria



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Canon Timeline, Gen, Snicket angst or Baudelaire angst? yes, canon compliant in the past? hopefully!, kit-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:46:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25576030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseandsangria/pseuds/roseandsangria
Summary: There are things Kit wishes she could tell the Baudelaires before they enter Hotel Denouement.
Relationships: Beatrice Baudelaire/Bertrand Baudelaire, Beatrice Baudelaire/Kit Snicket, Beatrice Baudelaire/Lemony Snicket, Count Olaf/Kit Snicket, Dewey Denouement/Kit Snicket, all ships are implied or mentioned
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	you're a flashback in a film reel

There are things that Kit wants to tell these children as she waits for them to join her for brunch. They are things Kit should have known about long before now, but many painful things happened in the interim. The world is wicked for all the efforts of her childhood and adulthood, their parents were so apprehensive, and now they are orphans.

She wonders if Sunny, orphaned as a babe in arms, now a young girl, remembers anything of her parents. The stories tell of a brave, fierce baby, and she gets it from her mother and father both, but does she know it beyond her siblings’ tales? Would Beatrice have shown her the scars on her shoulder blade from eagle talons? Did Bertrand sing her the lullaby that told them to protect their children the way Kit’s parents couldn’t, wouldn’t, _should_ have?

Kit doesn’t know. Her glances to the backseat had revealed just a blonde child, blue-eyed and nervous, and Kit knows where Sunny gets her looks from. Her knuckles ached from gripping the steering wheel. It takes her breath away because her face is Kit’s partner in crime, her best friend, who used to crank the passenger seat of the same very taxi back to get comfortable in the face of her overzealous driving. Sunny faced her driving with aplomb, while her father gripped the door at first. He was young and scared once too. They all were. His daughter’s cheeks are round in the same way as her mother’s, with all the hidden ferocity.

She remembers the telegrams from the volunteers who watched the Baudelaires, all their ingenuity and fierceness that had saved them from those who would have done them harm. Kit tucks the humor of the grim matter behind her teeth, thinks of Sunny’s sharp teeth and the aggravation she has caused to Olaf and his lackeys. She is Beatrice and Bertrand both.

She turns to see the children staring at the mesmerizing Denouement pond. Kit had once been as bowled over too. She wishes she could stay, visit her partner, but she also knows it is completely impossible. She has orders and if things go well, they will have all the time in the world for their daughter.

“Over here, Baudelaires!” she calls with forced cheer, and as they begin to move towards her, her eyes land on the two oldest Baudelaires. They are much more distant than their sister, despite the clear familiarity of the siblings. The ache in her chest reminds her that her family was once as close too. Once, her brother was a baby and she and her twin were the only ones who could protect him.

Now her twin is dead, and she misses him like a fucking limb. Despite not having spoken to him in years, the glimpses and left codes had soothed her anxiety and reminded her why things had to be so. He had been in the same city, and that had been enough for her. But now, her twin is dead, dead for _real,_ and everything is worse. The silence from her littlest brother hurts unimaginably more now. If things go well, she reminds herself sharply, she will be able to reach out, but—

Would he even answer? He mourns still for the Baudelaire mother.

The mother whose face is plastered all over her two eldest children. For all the oldest Baudelaire’s height, they could be twins in the right light. Their bodies are rangy, promising the same lankiness of adolescence in their adulthoods. Their faces have none of their mother’s roundness, only their father’s angles and the same blue eyes, but the dark hair and intense gazes mirrored on them both are Beatrice through and through. If Violet turns her face away from Kit, she looks _just like—_

Kit stops herself. Beatrice has been dead for months, and Kit has not been in love with her for years. Missing her, loving her is not the same as being in love. Lemony, on the other hand, carries a torch ever burning underneath his wool coat wherever he is now. Her daughter is not her, no matter how her nose matches just right, with her brother serving as the parallel homage to a dead woman.

When Klaus brought up the opera night with the same rueful amusement of his mother in his voice, Kit’s heart sank, and the nausea rose. She rallied quickly. They should know, but it should have come from their parents, not a wayward volunteer, once-confidante to their parents. She left out all the crucial parts and only told them of Beatrice’s shawl and the darts, and she hated herself for it. She was cowardly in her late pregnancy, even now, even when it mattered.

But how can you tell unlucky orphans that you had loved their mother? That even when Beatrice had loved the brother she’d die for, married the best friend she had helped Beatrice kill with, Kit loved her still? Giving Bertrand the ring for Beatrice was the easiest thing Kit had ever done, because she loved them both and Lemony had dead back then and he had loved her too, loved her first. Kit needed to do right by his memory, because she had thought she’d never see him again.

Giving up Beatrice hurt, but love had hurt before and love would hurt again. The baby she carried would learn it, just as she and her partner had learned, just as all the Baudelaires had.

She exhales and lets the future settle for a long moment. Klaus’s steps are longer now, and he outpaces his sisters. His curls are the same as Sunny’s, and they came from his father too. But he has his own sadness, a blameless guilt that his could-be twin shares and is all their own. Where the youngest Baudelaire shows bewildered savagery in the face of their misfortune, the oldest ones carry their parents’ sins without knowing what they were.

 _The sins of the father_ , Kit thinks bitterly, and cups her pregnant belly briefly.

If Klaus bears the guilt of his parents, Violet shoulders that and accepts the responsibility of her younger siblings too. It is almost painful to watch her, the easy way she holds Sunny’s hand with her eyes trained on Kit. She expects something to happen, Kit knows. It is the same harassed gaze she recognizes in the mirror, but Kit hides it better. She was properly trained for these bad days. Violet had none of the training because of her parents.

With Kit’s knowledge on Olaf these days, Violet is likely exhausted and terrorized. Fifteen years old, the weight of her siblings’ wellbeing and the title of the Baudelaire fortune heiress, now a fugitive—she has gone through the ringer. Kit is hit with the gratitude for being a true twin and for the first time, with a painful twinge, grateful for being several minutes younger than Jacques. She was the least hounded Snicket between her siblings. She was tested and trusted with little fanfare. Lemony was a—symbol, for either side of the schism, and Jacques was a model volunteer. Kit could disappear into her assignments, take days off with those she loved between the missions. If Jacques disappeared, it was a crisis, and if Lemony disappeared, it was trouble. Kit was extraneous but useful.

Violet had been loved and safe and secure, then tossed in Lake Lachrymose with a full belly and two desperate bodies holding onto her too. That haunted look, softened by the genuine smile slanted at Kit as they settle in for brunch, is not her parents’. Violet Baudelaire has been through worse than that.

Once, just after her birth, Kit had visited the Baudelaire mansion. It was before Violet’s parents had made the choice to prevent VFD access to their children: Kit, for all their love for her, was VFD through and through. She had come for congratulations, of course, but to ask questions too.

“Is she his?” Kit had asked in the faintest whisper as she stared at the baby in the bassinet. It was forced out, ground into glass through her clenched teeth. Every meeting between Kit and Beatrice was an impromptu wake for a dead man after Beatrice had returned, pregnant and newly married. Kit missed her little brother desperately. She wondered if there was a chance, a sliver of timing that had worked out—

“No,” Beatrice had said, and Kit’s heart shattered all over again. She had loved this woman for years, but her little brother had been born being loved by Kit.

“Of course,” she said, and smoothed a hand down the baby’s downy head. Violet yawned agreeably. “You’ll forgive me for asking.”

“K,” Beatrice said.

Kit knew that voice, recognized it in the same way she had when Olaf had begun the awful fires in response to Lemony’s too-smart, too-arrogant accusations. The same voice Beatrice had used after Kit had ended it initially with Olaf. It was pity and empathy, and Kit might scream.

“I’ve got to be on my way, you know,” she said loftily, so fake even to her own ears. “But J sends his regards to you both.” She stepped away and the ocean roared in her ears.

 _“Kit,”_ Beatrice said again.

“I know, B!” Kit snapped. “But you have to understand—”

“I do,” Beatrice interrupts immediately. “I _do._ I understand why you’d hope. But you know as well as I do that it’s much safer for her if she’s not his, regardless of the paternity.”

Kit took that in, exhaling slowly and sitting down in the rocker by the bassinet. Stupidly, her heart swelled a little as she absorbed Beatrice’s meaning. It could be, Beatrice was saying, but it couldn’t matter. “He didn’t used to be so reckless,” she said.

“No. He didn’t,” Beatrice agreed, and sat with her till Bertrand arrived home.

Now, though, Kit’s eyes don’t rove over Violet’s face with the same desperation that she had had back then. Now, she knows the truth of her baby brother’s death, after decoding it years ago. She had been livid with Jacques. She had sworn never to forgive them both. And now, Jacques was gone.

She thinks Violet could never do that to her siblings. Violet is probably better at being a sister than she was. Maybe it comes with the title of _oldest_ sibling, because Jacques thought he had to protect Kit too. It had enraged her when they were younger, but he had never minded beyond brotherly annoyance. Perhaps he already known she would forgive him.

Losing him was possibly the worst thing that had ever happened to her. At least Lemony came back from the dead before leaving again.

She wishes she could do more for Violet than tie up her hair like Bertrand rarely did. Showing her some tenderness may have assuaged the guilt she feels over Jacques, but of course she can’t. She doesn’t look too hard at Violet as she shifts. It doesn’t _matter_ if Violet’s face has a different curve from her parents, because she’s is firmly Bertrand’s daughter and the eldest Baudelaire orphan, and Kit is sending her on their first mission with her siblings and the same unclear directives that she had received when she was to complete her first mission too.

It doesn’t matter what Kit wants to tell these children, all their parents’ stories and how much she loved them both. It doesn’t matter that she’s too cowardly to express why their parents needed poison darts at the opera at all. It all will turn out the same, won’t it? The children will pay for their parents’ mistakes, over and over.

Stealing children away like her twin used to might be the most egregious crime of Kit Snicket in the eyes of the court, but sending the Baudelaires into Hotel Denouement makes her so sick that after she has hurried away from them, she kneels in the bushes and vomits.

The Baudelaires had sought to protect their children in every single way they could, protect them from all their parents’ faults, and Kit had sent them straight into the lion’s den. She had ignored all of Beatrice’s and Bertrand’s wishes. What kind of a mother does that make her? Will she let her child be snatched by her ankle too?

Kit wonders, wiping her hand clean with the back of the mouth, if she’ll go up in flames in much the same way history is inclined to repeat. Volunteering is a vicious cycle, gruesome at the beginning and end. She has known it since she was young.

She hasn’t the time to worry yet because Thursday fast approaches. If things go as poorly as she knows they will, she needs to be ready. It’s the best she can do for now.

Kit stands and walks back towards the taxi.

**Author's Note:**

> Kit seeing Jacques and Violet parallels hit me like a hammer writing this. Not sure if it's canon that Jacques knew Lemony was alive, but it's in here and I stand by it. I wrote this last night after the first line popped into my brain. If it demands Kit angst, so shall it be. 
> 
> Also exile is definitely a kitlaf song. my tears ricochet too, if we're being honest. august/seven are kitbea songs. Folklore is a Kit Snicket album. There. I said it. 
> 
> Hope you liked this drabble!


End file.
